Where I come from, I am famous for getting going if I totally want something. Like the time when I was ten and Mom offered me five dollars to clean up my room. I hadn’t touched it in a month and I had it spic and span in an hour. I filled up four garbage bags with junk and had those babies ready for pickup in about twenty minutes. After that, it was just a matter of putting on my iPod and scurrying.
Well, I was going to get going now and put my mind to it and whatever other clichés you want to haul out. I also had a saying of my own— or mostly my own. I borrowed it from my cousin Howard, a truly disgusting parent-pleaser: All A’s; stratospheric SATs; citizenship awards; the whole thing. Like you could puke.
I pretty much hated him until one day my dad asked him how he managed to do so well at everything he touched. And Howard said, “You mean school? Easy. I just figured out what those clowns wanted and I gave it to them.”
That was my new motto. Figure out what the clowns want and give it to them.
Brothers and sisters, I am here to testify that at that precious moment in the sight of the powers that be, I was born again— as Reeno Dimond, double agent, by day a mild-mannered model student at St. Psycho’s; by night a free-wheeling woman of the world, an outlaw goddess who made her own rules and lived by them. They couldn’t control my dreams, right?
Meanwhile, I had to get points. All you had to do to get points was the usual suck-up stuff— make your bed, keep your mouth shut, eat everything on your plate, go to class, make good grades, keep your journal, write your parents, and act like a robot.
It only took a hundred points to get to Level Two, which seemed like practically nothing. Of course that was because it was practically nothing. The sole difference between Level One and Level Two was access to condiments. That was it; the whole deal. But it was the first step on the way to freedom.
I could make a hundred points, easy. I’d already gotten ten in Evaluation— they gave us those just for going through it. Do that nine more times and I was eating hot dogs with mustard.
From there, it ought to be a piece of cake to move up. At Level Three, your parents could call you, and I was pretty sure that, given my special circumstances, I could talk the clowns into letting me talk to Haley as well.
At Level Four, your parents could take you off-campus— Dad had lied when he said I could come home when I wanted. Or maybe he’d just implied it. Who cared? I could get to Level Four in about three weeks, I figured. And then I could see Haley!
On that happy note, I finally did fall asleep. Nothing like getting thrown into prison and undergoing a complete attitude transplant to wear you out. I slept away the afternoon, through dinner, and into the night, but all the same, the day held one more horror, and when I say horror, I do not exaggerate. This was a big, hairy one, and I don’t mean that awful cat. When Kara came home, none too quietly, I opened my eyes only to behold four ginormous black spiders— like the size of my hand— hanging on the ceiling; and not in webs, either. Just lurking there upside down. Now if there’s anything I hate worse than cats, it’s spiders.
So the tough cookie screamed, prompting Kara to shrug. “What’s the big deal? They’re here every night.”
That made me feel so much better.
I couldn’t sleep for hours, contemplating what would happen if they came crawling down the walls. What if they slunk down and decided to skulk on my sunflower duvet? And then walk on me, with their thirty-two hairy legs, and munch me with their eight hideous mandibles?
That was so scary I cried myself to sleep.
I dreamed of my parents, only they didn’t look like themselves. They were young. Mom wasn’t so thin and worried-looking, and her color was good, meaning she was ivory, not dirty ivory. Dad had more hair and less heft, but, oddly enough, his color wasn’t as strong. Dad is bright, robust pink. Not very masculine, you might think, but you would be wrong. He practically glows. Not so much in my dream, though. He was lighter, almost pearl-pink. Calmer-seeming, maybe.
They were young and they were on a deck, having cocktails and talking, though I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Then Dad got up, knelt in front of Mom, as if he were about to propose, and the whole picture cracked into tiny pieces, like a jigsaw.
The pieces rearranged themselves and this time they were on the same deck, but their drinks had spilled, and flowerpots had turned over, as if a storm had blown through. Mom was still sitting in the same chair, but she was crying and crying and Dad was still on his knees, trying to comfort her, it looked like. But she was broken-hearted and couldn’t stop.
The scene changed— you know how that happens in dreams?— and I was looking at a movie. Old-time scary movie music came up as the screen announced in huge Gothic letters, THE CURSE OF THE JONESES. That was the name of the movie! And guess what— Jones is my mother’s middle name. The movie began.
Suddenly I was looking at my grandparents, only not younger, pretty much as I’ve always known them, in a church with a little girl. There was a casket at the front of the church and now there was solemn church music. Then a minister stepped up and began intoning about a young boy who would never see adulthood, who suffered so horribly… and even in my sleep my stomach clenched. This was what we all feared so much. For Haley.
Then there were other scenes— other parents, other dead children, first in 1940s outfits I recognized from old movies— those sexy long skirts and rolled-back hairdos— and after that, clothes from other periods. The reel speeded up, and the clothes kept going further and further back in history, and I began yelling in outrage, yelling for the movie to stop. But it didn’t stop. Instead, it flipped through a slide show of children, beginning with me! Then the little girl with my grandparents, who I realized must have been my mother, and I knew the boy in the casket had to be her brother, who had died when she was still little. Then other kids, once again in outfits that kept going back in time.
And then the scene switched to a two-year-old Chinese girl, baby Haley, clearly adopted, and terrified, yelling for Mom.
Blood dripped from her poor little baby tongue.
***
I woke up screaming. I didn’t know if it was from the dream, or because I was in bed with something horrible, something my hand was resting on. Something fuzzy and hairy, from the outer reaches of hell. The world’s biggest spider leg. Omigod, the worst had happened!
I screamed again. And again and again. I couldn’t stop screaming. But in about two seconds, Abuela was there, patting me, soothing me in Spanish. Telling me “There, there” or something like that, calling me chica and niña.
She hugged me, all soft and… sweet. Nice. Like my mom, back in the days when she could remember I was there. That could have made me sad, but instead I felt better. And I noticed something. That feeling I’d had the afternoon before, that this woman was someone I could trust, someone with a great heart, was somehow connected to her color. She radiated pure white. I’d never seen anyone else who did.
Abuela rattled on some more, partly in English, partly in Spanish, and finally I woke up enough to realize that she was asking what was wrong. I tried to explain about the huge spider leg but that just made her laugh in a way that actually managed to be reassuring. I didn’t catch everything; I guess I was still too out of it to penetrate her accent, but the words “gato” and “Jag” were all too clear, and so was this: “He must have been sleeping with you.”
Kara said. “Ha! That cat doesn’t sleep with anybody.”
So what was worse? Carnivorous spiders or a killer cat?
Abuela got me out of bed and brought me into the hall, where she had a chair set up so she could watch the whole floor, and a lamp for her embroidery, which she kept in one of those big Mexican shopping bags. She hugged me and patted me a little bit more, and it was so nice I thought it was almost worth it to have a nightmare. And then she asked if I was okay to go back to bed and sent me to the bathroom to wash my face.
And guess what was in the little round sink? A big, ugly, orange monster who’
d somehow squeezed his corpulent form into it, and whose tail was flicking ominously on the counter.
Well, enough already. This was night. At night, I was the real Reeno, the one who was master of her fate. “Scat, Jag,” I said, trying to sound bored. But my heart was pounding. What if he jumped me?
Instead he stood up in the sink, stretched, descended delicately to the floor, and ambled elegantly out, his unhandsome tail three feet up in the air and curling like a question mark. As he rounded the corner, he said, “As you wish, girl-thing.”
I mean, he didn’t say it, he couldn’t have. It was that voice again, the one I heard when I was feeling crazy. But it sure sounded like he said it.
CHAPTER FIVE—STUDY HALL
I figured I could make about eighteen points a day, just by going to class and doing my homework and stuff. No biggie— Ketchup City in about a week and a half. Sure enough, I had four points before breakfast my second day. All you really had to do was show up and go through the motions.
And a funny thing— it turned out I kind of liked the classes. I had history and Spanish with Carlos, which was great, and Kara was also in Spanish, which was tolerable, and two kids I sort of knew were in my English class— Kara’s friend Sonya and the weird preppy guy, who I now knew as Cooper Allingham. Sonya was okay. She was someone who gave people little shout-outs in class, very supportive. Cooper, on the other hand, was plain mean.
“I was right the first time,” I told Carlos. “It’s like he zeros in on the most vulnerable millimeter of your psyche and sinks the knife exactly… there. Bullseye every time.”
“Uh-huh. More?”
“There’s this blonde chick, Julia. I can’t warm up to her, either— mall rat material, very shiny— but everything he says to her somehow manages to disparage her tiny brain.”
“You’re not doing so bad yourself.”
“Well I wouldn’t say that to her. I’m not even sure she’s dumb— but she thinks she is, people have been telling her that all her life. You can tell that from the way she reacts. And Sonya! He can’t speak to her without calling her fat. Major, major assweed.”
“All righty, then, the main event. What about you?”
“Me? Nothing. He never talks to me.”
Except the time he asked me if I felt guilty about being the healthy one in my family. That hurt so bad I couldn’t even repeat it. Plus, it begged the question of how he knew about Haley. Was he mean enough to steal people’s files just to insult them? Had he somehow hacked into some secret student database? Did he know someone I knew? It just wasn’t something I preferred to spend my time thinking about. I changed the subject.
“You know Rachel? That girl from our orientation?”
“Oh, yeah. Good Citizen Barbie.”
“And a Level Four, as she never fails to tell you in the first thirty seconds of any conversation. She filled me in on my roommate. Know what? She’s been here six months and she’s still a Level One.”
Carlos whistled. “What the hell’s up with that?”
“I don’t know. World’s biggest loser? Off the top of my head.”
“Wonder what that Cooper guy would do with that one.”
“Let’s hope they don’t know each other.”
“Do you find him attractive at all?”
“Eeeeeeew.”
He gave me a sidewise squint. “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”
But it wasn’t that. It was that creepy color he was— like Haley. I couldn’t shake the thought that maybe he was dying too.
***
I was in the library, working on this essay for English when Jabba the Cat turned up again. He jumped up on the table and settled himself like the King of Abyssinia. Maybe there was a reason that country— if it even is one— came to mind. I think an Abyssinian cat’s one of those fancy breeds, and, trust me, Jag was anything but that. But he had an aristocratic look to him, one of those triangular heads like Siamese cats have. He really wouldn’t have looked so bad except that he had ears like a bat— great big funnel-looking things that he could turn around on his head like radar— and a nose almost as big as a human’s.
He was about the size of an ocelot. I mean huge. If he got up on your chest and purred, like normal cats do, you probably couldn’t breathe. He had a muscular body, but not thin, definitely not wiry, and he had one of those belly pouches like tigers have. I read somewhere that that’s where cats carry their fat. Jag had a pretty awesome supply of it. He could probably live off his pouch for a month. Yeah, I may have called him fat before, but he wasn’t really. He was just a great big hulking monster.
And he wasn’t exactly orange, either, although I may have called him that as well. Well, he sort of was, but he was really more a peachy kind of color. Sandy, you might say, but with a lot more red in it. Strawberry blond? On a person maybe, but this was a cat. He had faint stripes on him, in some kind of broken-up tabby pattern.
His eyes, except for a weird little blue halo around the irises, pretty much matched his fur. They were kind of gold, that color that’s technically known as “amber,” but isn’t anything like real amber, because cats’ eyes have a scary sheen to them.
Everything about Jag was scary.
Especially his feet. They just did not compute on a house cat. They were about twice the size of Curly’s— maybe more like a boxer’s paws, except with these machete-like claws on them.
And I’ve already told you about his tail.
That was the creature that was now pretending to sleep on the table while I was trying to write my essay. Having him there was working my nerves. He had his great big evil eyes closed, but I figured he was laying a trap of some kind— maybe getting ready to tear my face off. I intended to get up and move quietly to another table, but for some reason I sketched him first, all curled up like a little kitten. “Cat Position One—” I called the sketch, “Fur Grenade.”
I was just finishing up when he opened his eyes.
I thought, Close your ugly eyes, Furface. You looked a lot better before.
His eyes snapped shut.
That went so well I turned back to my essay. But I’d only written a couple of words when I felt something grab my wrist. Before I could even register what had happened, my hand streaked down the paper, still holding my pen. Jag’s tail was wrapped around my wrist. That voice, that kind of know-it-all, seen-it-all, slightly British one, said, “Better furred than freckled, Novice.”
I bit my lip to keep from screaming— the last thing I needed was another consequence. I tried to pull away, but that scary tail gripped me like a pair of kitty handcuffs. Two more strokes quickly joined the diagonal line my imprisoned hand had made with the first assault. Leaving a giant “A” scrawled on the page.
The thing finally let go.
Freaked didn’t begin to describe. I was, like, in another world, shaking and sweating and scared as hell.
But what was I going to do— call for help? Say a talking cat had grabbed me with his tail?
“Your sister’s adopted, isn’t she?”
“Duuuh! She’s Chinese.” Damn! I thought, Why did I say that? I mean, think it? I will not be drawn into a telepathic chat with a kitty-cat.
A completely different voice, a head-of-state type thing, suddenly said, “You will not call the Alpha Beast cute names!”
With an effort, I kept myself once more from having a screaming fit— this was getting old. “Hey, Jag,” I stammered. “Chill, okay? Use that other voice again.”
“Certainly, my dear,” the Jag voice said. And then, a growly one inquired, “Parlez-vous Français?” and then a young but very cultured English one, kind of like Hugh Grant, said, “Pardon me, do I unnerve you?”
I’ll admit it— I was kind of fascinated. “What’s your real voice?” I asked.
And the thing did a perfect puddytat imitation. “Meow.”
Every head in the room turned. There’s a strict rule against talking in the library. But someone said, “Hey. Jag spo
ke. He never talks.”
And there it was— independent evidence that the cat was talking to me. Somebody else had heard him meow.
“Do that again,” I said silently.
“Meow,” said Jag, and rubbed up against me.
The librarian whispered, “Look. He likes you.”
“Did you hear him meow?”
“Sure. Didn’t you?”
“Twice, I mean.”
“Yep. A first— and then a second— all in the same five seconds. We all thought he was mute.”
“Oh.”
“Well, girlet,” the Beast said blandly, “have I finally managed to convince you?”
Okay, I was convinced. For whatever reason, he could talk to me— and weirder still, I could answer.
“Excellent,” he said. “I’m delighted to have that out of the way.”
“Quit reading my mind. It’s rude.”
“As it happens, I’m not reading your mind. Surely you’re aware of the hypnotist’s claim that you won’t do anything you wouldn’t ordinarily do while you’re in a trance? This form of telepathy is like that. I can’t get into your mind unless you want me to. I can only hear what you’re sending me. In short— we’re simpatico, embryo.”
“We are not simpatico— you’re some kind of monster!”
He preened a little. “True. True. I am a monster. But if you’re talking to me, you’re in no danger. I can only talk with one human at a time— my assistant— and, more’s the pity, you appear to be in line for the job. My handmaiden of the moment is very seldom on my hit list.”
Hit list. Here was a pussycat talking about a hit list. All right, I was willing to concede that this was no ordinary pussycat, but the question remained: What was it?
“I told you,” Jag said. “I am the Alpha Beast.”
“You want to expand on that?”
“I am a Planet Guardian,” he said grandly.
I was utterly in the dark. “Well, that’s a lot of help.”
“Permit me to go back a step or two. You’ve heard of the Gaia theory?”
He had me there. “Uh, I think I saw a special on it once—”
Bad Girl School Page 4